Tradition

I note this week an editorial printed in the local rag the day before Veterans Day that was certain to greatly disturb the waters. The writer posited that those who'd attended Woodstock were morally superior to those, like John McCain, who'd served in Viet Nam.

I don't buy into any argument that advocates a moral superiority of any person or group over any other. Notions of that sort were quashed after my time managing the homeless shelter. As we've discussed many times before, short of allying yourself with 'ism's carrying the potential or actuality for genocide, most situations aren't so easy to classify in terms of a morally superior good or non-circumstantial evil.

Though it was surpisingly bold and intentionally provocative (if not a bit tactless) for the paper to publish the piece on the day before the holiday), it certainly had stir-the-pot impact, enticing the usual rabid attack dog suspects to launch the wearying Goebellian tactics practiced by despots and muttonheads throughout the ages.

Painting with a wide brush of stereotypically based ridicule is the easy way here, to quote, "How can he say that those who participated in the perverted debauchery of Woodstock...," and "drug-induced escapism is not morally superior," and on and on. Then there are those, unlike me, who find it very easy to identify good and evil through elminating all the gray inbetween, such as, "You can't have it both ways. Either America is a country to be proud of...or it should be allowed to be destroyed by left-wing liberals who believe nothing is worth dying for," ending, obligatoriliy, of course, with a dig at a Clinton, doesn't matter which one.

Life negates the absence of gray. The deepest tendencies I hold are to what would be defined, minimally as liberal, and maximally, as far left, by the attack dogs above. Recognizing that, I served in the Navy, on the principle that in order to legitimately hold such views, it was necessary to participate within the civic framework constructed to protect the right to express them.

As far as countering the ridicule, events like Woodstock, were much more than a party-binge. As a barometer of the times, contrast the message and accompanying peaceful behavior observed in 1969 to the violent alcoholically fueled flames of mindless rage-driven riot at the 30th anniversary concert.

A non-consistently debauched, rather mysterious, group appeared in 1966 San Francisco called the Diggers, who engineered 'street happenings,' such as planting a 12 X 12 yellow square at the intersection of Haight and Ashbury Streets, urging people to look through so they could experience street theater through their own frame of reference. They opened a store where everything was free, including the contents of a cashbox labelled 'free money,' guarded by a sign that read, "No Stealing."

The Digger's goal was to portray American lives as if they were constructed by actors in a play, of which, alternative endings were possible - one theological current, leading to the idea that a person could be 'born again.' This is not 'drug-induced,' escapism - indeed, there were many in San Francisco, at the time, and elsewhere, that subscribed to the idea that drugs could only take you so far, and as Tom Wolfe wrote, it was time to pass the acid test and graduate, with new insights gained, moving on to a higher ground.

The Diggers didn't appear out of thin air. In another tumultuous time, 17th century England, the original band arose, along with other 'Dissenters,' fighting with their very lives for a religious liberty, denied not only to Roman Catholics, but to anyone not ultimately subscribing to the commonwealth of Puritanism established by Oliver Cromwell. They desired a Jeffersonian, Peter Maurin/Catholic Worker agrarian communal society, based on the book of ACTS, that proposed a society much as envisioned later by the 20th century Diggers of the same name and trans-cultural ideology.

It's interesting to note when Cromwell was fighting for power, he was very tolerant and ecumenical in enlisting those who served his cause; but once, power was secured, dissent was eliminated. Is there any movement, ever in time, that doesn't produce this effect; where it isn't like The Who song, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

This is what we've been studying in Adult Sunday School as we examine the lives of the prophets - the great irony, of which Walter Brueggemann writes: when Israel was at the height of it's Solomonaic empire and power, it was most like, for the common people, living back in the pre-Exodus time of Pharaoh, from which God delivered His chosen ones. Can the fresh promise of any organizational exodus survive for long without the stultifying imposition of a new bureaucratic self-vested army of organizers who necessarily construct and protect, but, within the process, destroy the original freedom that gave birth to new ideas? In other words, to place it in the San Francisco context of the day, do anarchic child-like hippies always require the services of an authoritarian father like Bill Graham to stage the concerts?

Out of all historical context, the promise of America and Christianity is that within the framework of country and religion, an alternative vision continuously beckons away from the power of status quo and co-optive consumption to something new without destroying the steady yet yielding platform upon which it stands, pointing inevitably further to the shining city on the distant hill of America in the morning, and even beyond, over yonder, to the idyllic land of heavenly milk and honey.

Veterans day is not only about honoring the past; I have no doubt that those who died must have desired a better future worthy of a sacrifice of the magnitude they made. If not, then each death diminishes without raising us to the higher ground of the promised land; those places of which the Woodstockian dreamers sing their songs.